The Death of an Irish Consul Page 2

  To get out of the wind, McGarr opened the door to the Rover and, sitting in the front passenger seat, put down the lid to the glove compartment. On this he placed the contents of the man’s pockets. His wallet said he was Edward Llewelyn John Hitchcock. He had a U.K. driver’s license listing a London address in St. John’s Wood, a national insurance card, Barclay’s Bank, American Express, and Carte Blanche charge cards, a return stub on an Aer Lingus jet from Shannon to Heathrow, and membership cards to the East India, Bat, and Proscenium men’s clubs. A compartment contained eighty-seven pounds cash. The wallet was initialed, black alligator, thin, and very efficient in appearance. Keys to a Jaguar sedan also fit in twin slits. Hitchcock had kept green ink in his Mt. Blanc fountain pen. On the back of his Rolex wristwatch, the dial of which was equipped with a device to determine times in other parts of the world, was the inscription “To C. from your Sis-ter,” and under that, “Peace through Truth, London, 1973.”

  “Strange caption,” McKeon mused, “even from one’s sister.”

  The men were crowded around the open door of the Rover. “That’s the first time I’ve known an inscription to stammer,” said Harry Greaves.

  “C. is what the chief of SIS, the British Secret Service, is called.”

  Scanlon raised his head and looked at the house again. “And there I thought he was on the Coal Board all along.”

  “Probably was—as a front,” said McGarr.

  Dick Delaney added, “That’s the outfit that isn’t required to account for its funds, and I mean the legal ones it gets from Parliament, not whatever the Chinese or Russians will pay for negotiable state secrets.”

  “How was the weather hereabouts last week, Terrence?”

  “Cold, windy, and wet. Foggy at nights. We had a storm on Monday.”

  “Let’s take a look at the house. Hitchcock was wearing only a thin cardigan and cotton clothes. The gunshot he suffered might have been a coup de grace for all we know.”

  After having crossed a wide and chilly veranda, they found the front door open. Spare was the word that occurred to McGarr as he looked about the parlor and dining room. He supposed that Hitchcock and his wife had bought the house “all found,” and what they had found had either been quite meager or not suited to their tastes. Thus, the large parlor contained only a straight-back love seat and two chairs grouped around the fireplace. Intricate designs, all swirls and frills, had been carved into the heavy oak. These garish pieces seemed to require the vast emptiness of the room. Linen curtains, yellow with age, were drawn across three windows. They were brilliant now in the full sun.

  The dining room was on the other side of the hallway. There a massive table of the same design as the furniture in the living room dominated the middle of the room. The backs of the twelve ornate chairs were as tall as McGarr. The only other item in the room was a matching and ponderous sideboard. The table had been set for one, and a meal of spring lamb with a pretty suprême of potatoes, carrots, brussels sprouts, and leeks had been half-consumed, as though whoever had killed Hitchcock had disturbed him in the midst of his dinner. A half-empty bottle of Hermitage Rouge, 1967, sat near the wine glass, which appeared to be, surprisingly, empty and clean. There was no sediment or stain of dried wine on the bottom. Certainly Hitchcock hadn’t drunk from the bottle. McGarr picked up the cork, which lay directly above the knife, and squeezed it between thumb and forefinger. It was still moist and springy.

  The kitchen was a mess that bore all the appearances of having had an amateur chef at work in it for, say, an afternoon. McGarr knew from his own brief forays into the world of haute cuisine that the hobbyist never thinks of washing or re-using a spatula, spoon, whisk, grater, garlic press, etc., in order to minimize his cleaning duties at the end of the preparation, but is usually at least one step behind the recipe and has to rush to keep from ruining the whole meal. Thus, as in this kitchen, eggshells are not dispatched immediately after use, knives lay about the tops of the tables and cutting boards, pots, and pans begin to mount up, until all kitchen surfaces are cluttered.

  What struck McGarr, however, is why a man would go to such bother—a pâté in a fluted pastry shell (McGarr cut himself a slice: hare), vichyssoise, scalloped oysters—just to dine alone. One cooks for an audience, especially something as toothsome as the deep-dish gooseberry pie that was still on a rack in the open oven. Also, the trash, which was kept in a small bin behind curtains under a counter, had been spilled about the floor in that area. The bin itself was still upright, but somebody had reached in and extracted its contents, as though looking for something. Things were just not quite right inside this house, McGarr thought.

  After having examined the rest of the house, which he found to be as spare and neat as the living room, McGarr returned to the kitchen, cut the gooseberry pie in seven generous pieces, and put on a pot of water for tea.

  While the gas flame roared on the copper bottom of the kettle, he said to Hughie Ward, “Well, now—I want a thorough autopsy of Hitchcock’s body. I believe that the bullet, given the point of entry at the base of the cranium and trajectory through the skull, might not have struck bone.” He fished in his pocket and pulled out the cartridge casing Scanlon had found in the outbuilding under a crack in one of the wall sills. “We could be lucky. Many twenty-two-caliber handguns are special issues.” McGarr had once put a dope smuggler away for life because of the man’s preference for unusual weapons. “If it’s intact, I want a complete analysis of the chamber markings and a set of photographs.”

  Ward copied these requests into his notebook.

  The tea kettle began to whistle. McKeon warmed the ceramic pot, tossed out that water, added tea, and then poured the boiling water over it. “I wonder if the blighter imbibed anything stronger than wine.”

  Hands in raincoat pockets, the men were waiting for a go-ahead from McGarr to hunt up a bottle, which all of them knew such a house must contain.

  But McGarr did not want anything in the dining room, bottles in particular, touched. “Fingerprints all around, Hughie. We’ll put the teacups and pots on the veranda as we leave.” He stood and walked back into the dining room. Suddenly the room grew dark and seemed gloomy. McGarr parted the curtains. The sky in western Ireland could change dramatically within minutes. Now it was freighted with storm clouds racing in off the ocean.

  When he looked down at the table, the wine glass again caught his eye. Striking a wooden match, he held the flame near the exterior surface to see if he could detect the traces of fingerprints. There were several. He also noticed, however, a blue tint on the inside of the glass. He walked back into the kitchen.

  In the shadows under the sink McGarr found a liquid that he knew would leave a blue film on a glass which was not thoroughly rinsed in hot water. “I want the inside of that wine glass in the dining room analyzed and also the surface of this soap container checked for fingerprints, although I don’t think we’ll find anything on that.” McGarr was staring at a rubber glove that had been tossed carelessly into the cabinet. It was hanging from the S-curve of the sink pipe. With his fountain pen he pried up the edge of the glove. The inside was wet.

  McGarr opened the cupboards and with his handkerchief began taking plates off the stacks. Only the bottoms of the first of every size were wet. One whiskey and one wine glass also had been washed in liquid cleaner and imperfectly rinsed.

  Ward had poured the tea.

  McGarr drank off a cup.

  If the killer had first dined with Hitchcock, thought McGarr, and, after having drugged or poisoned him, carted him out to the hen house where, sometime later, he finally dispatched the man, then he would have washed the dishes and put them away to expunge all trace of his having been there. “I also want a blood analysis. He doesn’t look like he was a drinker, but this wine bottle bothers me. If the killer drugged his wine and then took the precaution of trying to wash away the drug from the glass and of killing Hitchcock sometime after the drug had worn off, then it could be he knows we can t
race the drug to him. Let’s take a look at the garbage.”

  Out at the trash bin, McGarr discovered that somebody had also rifled through the garbage. Within the small, wooden compound near the back door, refuse had been tossed on the ground and then kicked about, as though somebody in a rush or fit of pique had been trying to find something.

  “What are you looking for, Chief?” asked Sinclair, who had followed him throughout his perusal of the house and its contents. Sinclair was a tall man who dressed nattily. He had spent over twenty years on the Sydney police force before returning home to work for McGarr.

  “Wine bottle. I’d bet my brown derby nobody drank from that bottle on the table in the dining room.”

  They poked through the garbage but could find no other wine bottle.

  McGarr turned and walked toward the shed. He pulled out his pocket torch and once again held his handkerchief to his nose. There, in the shadows and against the wall, Hitchcock still lay contorted either from the force of the shot into the base of his skull or from the momentary agony of his death throe.

  McGarr was most interested, however, in the pattern of his movements through the dirt and chicken droppings on the shed floor before he was dispatched. After all, if the man indeed had been the chief of SIS, then perhaps he might have taken pains to provide at least one lead to his killers.

  The shed was small and McGarr quickly covered every square inch. He then began turning over the dirt and offal on the floor wherever Hitchcock had crawled. Still nothing. Finally, McGarr searched the corpse once more, thinking that perhaps he might have missed something the first time. But he was disappointed, until, just as he was about to leave, it struck him that the only means a man who had been bound as thoroughly as Hitchcock had to conceal an object would be with his mouth. When McGarr squatted and, using his handkerchief, gently pried up Hitchcock’s lips, he found something wedged between the back of his teeth. With a jerk, McGarr pulled it out. It was a cork. Shining the beam of the torch directly on it, he discovered a perforation in the center, the kind a pressure wine-bottle opener made. Whoever had killed Hitchcock had probably taken the drugged wine bottle with him, but, since Hitchcock, as host, must have opened it himself, he probably placed the cork in his shirt or cardigan pocket and later, when coming to in the shed, realized what was happening to him and pulled the cork out of the pocket with his teeth. Because of the way his wrists and ankles had been bound together, the pain must have been agonizing. Another possibility was that, feeling the first effects of the drugged wine and knowing that he would be killed, he had slipped the cork into his mouth before he had passed out.

  Now there were several other policemen in the shed with McGarr. Sinclair said, “Probably drugged or poisoned the wine. That’s how the killer or killers got him out to the shed.”

  “Drugged, more likely,” said Ward. “He did a lot of moving in there. Also, there’s probably only one killer.”

  Sinclair and Greaves looked up at Ward.

  “Only one of each type of plate had a wet bottom.”

  “First honors for the lad with the little black notebook,” said McGarr. He dropped the cork into a little plastic bag that Ward was holding. The chief inspector then donned his jacket and coat once more. Greaves shoveled the trash back into the bin.

  At the car, fat drops of rain had begun to fall now, and the sky was a patchwork of tumbling dark clouds where the ocean storm met the warm air off the land.

  TWO

  NEXT MORNING, McGarr stepped into a phone booth and dialed Hugh Madigan’s office. He was a London-based private detective and an old Dublin friend of McGarr’s. After some small talk, McGarr said, “I’ve got an assignment for you which is a part of an official Garda investigation into the murder in Ireland of a U.K. citizen.”

  “Then, why call me? Not that I mind, Peter; it’s just that the procedure seems extraordinary. Shouldn’t you request assistance from Scotland Yard?”

  “Well—let me give you the man’s name. I haven’t released it to the newspapers yet.” McGarr considered briefly the cloak of red tape in which the British government could wrap his investigation. “I want a credit check and complete dossiers of him and his wife. I want to know if he had any personal enemies, who his friends were, and what, if anything, he has been doing since”—McGarr recalled the date on the back of the dead man’s watch—“1973.” The house on Dingle Bay held none of the accouterments—books, games, objets d’art—of a man of leisure, but looked more like a getaway-from-it-all place.

  “Name?”

  “Edward Llewelyn John Hitchcock.”

  “Not——”

  “I thought nobody was really supposed to know who he was. His address is Sixty Avenue Road, St. John’s Wood.” The other end of the line was quiet. “Hugh?”

  “I now work in this town, Peter. We’re no longer two agency pals who are doing each other a good turn, now and again. This is my business, the sole support of my family. Have you informed the government about this?”

  McGarr looked out at the crowds pushing by the phone booth: Pakistanis, Indians, and Orientals mostly, with some Caucasians here and there and probably half of them Irish. “I’m at Heathrow, just having arrived. When I hang up this phone, I’m headed straight for Scotland Yard.”

  Still the other end of the line was quiet.

  “Think of all the extralegal assistance I’ve provided you in the past, Hugh. And in this case we’re willing to pay.”

  “I’m not trying to extort a big fee, Peter; you know that. It’s just that, if I know SIS, they’ll swarm all over this case.

  “The section chiefs went to the same schools, belong to the same clubs. They’re more like a social subset than a ministry. They’ll not want any news of the killing, any inquiries other than their own, and certainly none originating from another country, especially Ireland.”

  “But, you see, Hugh, the murder happened in Ireland. I’ve got the details. If they try to keep me from investigating here, I’ll give them none of the facts of my investigation there. I might even release the whole bloody business to the most lurid of London dailies. It’s as simple as that.”

  “It is? Don’t count on it. These are snooty old boys, Peter. To them, red tape is all they have that resembles work. Your news will bring them together. They’ll collect in some smart City club and consider the demise of poor Hitchcock. ‘Dear C., poor C., he was right enough in his own curious way, what?’ They’ll then concoct some baroque argument to explain the murder or some means to obfuscate his personal history, as if that mattered. You know—it’ll all be such fun considering who and why and—if you refuse to give them any details—how. Then the process of ‘keeping the wretched business quiet’ will occupy them for several days at least. To tell you the truth, I don’t want to become involved with those idiots.”

  “If you act fast, we can have all the information before they even become aware of his death.”

  “Why don’t you do it yourself?”

  “You can answer all my questions in one morning on the phone. You’ve got the contacts and know where to look. Nobody will think your inquiries are anything but routine. Once I open my mouth, Whitehall, the Yard, MI5, maybe even the Home Guard will be put on notice.”

  Madigan sighed. “What’s your first step?”

  “The Yard, as I told you. I’ve got to tell them I’m here and ask for their cooperation. If they agree, I’ll hand them my report without once mentioning that I know who Hitchcock was. Who knows—maybe we might blunder right along with a perfectly regular investigation.”

  “Don’t expect that.”

  “Well, the most I’m hoping for is a chance to get to talk to his widow.”

  Madigan sighed again.

  “And maybe talking to his former associates.”

  “Not a chance. Lookit, Peter—I don’t know why you’re being so assiduous about this thing. From the little I can remember about Hitchcock’s reputation, he deserved all he got and more. These people are someth
ing less than professional murderers. They give the orders. When one of them gets hit, we’re all better off for it.”

  An old woman, who throughout McGarr’s phone call had been standing close to the booth, now turned and, using the heel of her palm, banged twice on the cabinet. The sheet metal roared.

  “Hello—are you there, Peter? Peter!”

  “Why, the old hag,” said McGarr under his breath. She was wizened with age and her lips, now working over false teeth as she glared at McGarr, had spread her lipstick in a halo around her mouth. “Yes—do we have a deal?”

  “You scared me,” said Madigan. “For a moment I thought Hitchcock’s associates might have proved more efficient than I thought.”

  “Is it a deal?”

  “Well—all right. But I’m only going to give you one day. I can’t put anybody else on this thing and I can’t afford to waste more than a day on it.”

  “Waste? Think of it this way, Hugh—not only are you getting paid, and well, but you’re also getting a chance to work for your own country.”

  “For once. It’ll be the closest I’ve ever come to having a job back home.”

  The old woman hit the shell of the phone booth twice more and McGarr rang off. Stepping out, he said, “You ignorant old shrew—have you no manners?”

  “In direct proportion to your consideration for others, Paddy. And bad cess to you.” She stepped into the booth and rammed the door shut behind her.

  McGarr took a taxi to Scotland Yard.

  McGarr had always enjoyed London. Like Paris, it was a world center—bustling, cosmopolitan, vibrant—but the scale of London’s buildings and streets was human, small townish and friendly. McGarr knew that for several centuries the town had been notorious for deplorable living conditions, poverty, and vice. And he knew of sections which even now were less than desirable to inhabit. But compared to the slums of most other large cities, London’s low-income districts were showplaces. Trams, trains, buses were regular, clean, and safe. And the yardstick that mattered most to McGarr weighed heavily in favor of London—one encountered more men of goodwill here than in any city of its size that he had ever visited.